Crochet, animation: All in a life's work for young crafter

No, this is not that film on the birds and the bees you were forced to watch in high school. This is a movie starring Vanessa Chan's Amigurumi.

Amigurumi is a Japanese term for knitted or crocheted mini dolls, animals or cute inanimate objects.

Chan crochets her Amigurumi with an F hook 3.75 millimeter needle using 100 percent cotton yarn, but she says any yarn will do. A single stitch is used, and the crafter increases or decreases the row depending on the shape he or she wants to make.

Now back to that egg. That was the first Amigurumi object Chan made a few years ago. The egg is a happy-go-lucky fellow with rosy cheeks sitting in an egg cup.

Chan, 23, graduated from college a year ago and majored in computer animation. When she was 5 she was enamored with Tim Burton's stop-motion animation style in "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Now the spotlight is on two of her Amigurami dolls. They were stars in her stop-motion film, made for her senior project, called "Building Blocks."

Her crocheted creations also keep her hopping since she set up shop on Etsy (a Web site for handmade items), under the shop moniker The Pudgy Rabbit. She also has a blog of the same name where she displays her Amigurumi and talks about her other passion: cooking. This holiday season she started making Amigurumi ornaments.

"So I'm not just making things that collect dust," Chan says.

Building Blocks from Vanessa Chan on Vimeo.

A lifelong Poughkeepsie resident, Chan decided to concentrate on stop-motion animation like Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit. But stop-motion and Claymation are expensive processes for producers. There are more job opportunities in television and computers, so Chan is going back for those classes, but her passion will always be with the animation techniques that made Art Clokey's "Gumby" famous. She said if you look hard you can sometimes see the artist's fingerprint in the clay figure. Some might see this as a reason to press the delete button and start again, but Chan doesn't think so.

"I think it's a nice thing when you can see the imprint of the artist," Chan said. "It's not glossy like digital animation."

As for her Amigurumi animals, Chan decided to design her own crocheting patterns so she wouldn't run into any copyright infringement issues when selling on Etsy. Her patterns are also for sale.